Course for Young Doctors

Young Doctors Course: Lecture VIII

Schmidt Number: S-5574

On-line since: 10th September, 2008

LECTURE VIII

Dornach, January 9, 1924

It is, of course, only possible to give
aphoristic indications here of what will have to be
communicated in detail as time goes on, if your connection
with the movement at the Goetheanum is to be continued in any
real way.

It must be
emphasized, above all, that in the very nature of things, one
cannot heal in opposition to karma. The fundamental attitude
of the physician must be that no healing is possible if it
runs counter to karma. In his will-to-heal, the physician's
attitude must, from the very outset, tend in two directions.
First of all, there must be the unconquerable will that karma
be fulfilled. The physician needs this above all for himself,
for as you have heard, in a sense, he loses, so far as he
himself is concerned, the effect of what he uses for his
patients. It can, of course, be transformed so that it will
also be effective for him, but all you need to know, in the
first place, is what I have already said on this subject. The
physician, too, is naturally subject to karma so far as his
own health and illness are concerned. But when the proper
attitude is present, when therapeutic knowledge penetrates
deeply into the human soul, it can be said that the
consciousness of karma becomes more and more an actual
revelation of karma.

Karma has its
two sides. You must regard karma in such a way that you
relate your destiny to the earthly life immediately preceding
the present one. Karma, in this aspect, is the expression of
what the previously earthly lives have brought. But you have
also to think of karma in the fifth or sixth subsequent
earthly life, in the fifth or sixth life following the
present one. Then you will have the results of what is
happening now. If you carry this thought to its conclusion,
you will realize that karma, too, is in the becoming, that
what is happening now adds one thing or another to karma. It
can also be said that here and there our deeds may give a
turn to karma. Nobody who understands karma can ever be a
fatalist.

The one
direction of the physician's attitude is, therefore, towards
karma. This leads to a sense of security and sureness in
life, gives a firm standpoint. The other direction, however,
is this; that the will-to-heal must always be present. This
will must never, under any circumstances, weaken. It must be
at work in therapy all the time, so that it can be truly said
that everything possible is being done, even when one is of
the opinion that the patient is incurable. You must suppress
this opinion and do everything possible about healing. I
merely indicate this, aphoristically.

What we have
to do today is to deepen, in the esoteric sense, those things
that may result in the awakening of soul forces in medical
study. The content of the esoteric teaching must assume a
particular form, must become a special activity, for the
physician. The physician will not be able to content himself
with looking at things as they are looked at in ordinary
life. This is just what ordinary science does. Science does
not call upon forces of soul which are not applied in
ordinary life; on the contrary, science throws all its weight
upon the side of not calling upon such forces. But the
ordinary, current view of life does not enable us to know
that some substance or process in the world contains healing
forces. The healing forces are only revealed by things when
we approach them with certain awakened powers of soul. It
will be for you, step by step, to awaken these powers of soul
in order that things may speak to you in such a way that in
your work as physicians you are able to help human beings by
their means. What is of importance is that what I have said
to you about the attitude of the physician shall be
infinitely deepened in your souls.

I will take a
simple subject, to begin with, and treat it in the way in
which it ought to be treated in medical study. It will seem
aphoristic here, but when there is time, it will be
developed.

Think of the
form that is revealed to you in the bony skull. We can take
this bony skull and draw it. Look at its form and contrast
this form with what is revealed to you by a long bone —
let us say the thigh bone. These bones are not quite on their
own, for manifold physical forces play around the bony skull;
equally manifold forces play around the long bones. But the
reality of a long bone will only be revealed to you if you
study it in connection with the whole universe.

Just think of
a long bone. Its forces are such that they pass through its
length, and when the human being assumes his true earthly
posture, they actually go down to the central point of the
earth. But that is not the essential. The essential thing
about a long bone is that it introduces these forces into the
connection that exists between the central point of the earth
and the moon. Therefore whatever is placed in the body like
the long bone of the thigh or the bone of the upper arm, or a
muscle lying in a similar position, is really inserted into
the forces which connect the earth with the moon. You can
picture it like this. Here you have the earth. (See diagram
below.)

Forces stream
up to the moon from the earth and these forces include
everything that is involved, let us say, in the position in
which the thigh is when the human being is standing or
walking.

On the other
hand, everything that has a position like that of the
skull-covering is membered into the Saturn movement. In the
skull there are the rotatory forces which belong to Saturn.
So that we can say: The human being is formed from below
upwards through the connection between earth and moon. He is
rounded off, finished off, by the rotatory forces of Saturn.
But these two kinds of forces are counter to each other. In
the forces which are contained in the connection between
earth and moon there lies everything that gives the human
being his plastic form, everything that builds him,
plastically. One might say: There is a secret sculptor in
these forces; whereas the other forces give rise to a
perpetual process of demolition, in which the substances
which build up the human being plastically are again
disintegrated or dispersed. When you cut a nail, you with
your scissors are in the Saturn forces; when you eat, this
takes you into the realm of the forces working between earth
and moon. All these latter forces are up-building forces. All
the other forces pulverize the human being. In this
interaction between pulverization and plastic up-building
live the soul of man and the spirit of man. Therein they
manifest themselves.

All that is
connected with the etheric body of man both in the outer
world and within man himself is connected with these
peripheric forces. Silver is connected, in a certain respect,
with the forces of up-building. So that when you notice in a
human being that the up-building forces are being overpowered
by the forces of demolition, you can as a rule correct this
by means of some medicament derived from silver. But if you
notice that the up-building forces are rampant, that they are
maintaining the human being too strongly within his form,
hindering as it were the process of pulverization, you will
have recourse to the remedies that come from Saturn, from
lead. When we know how the human being is built up, we begin
to see how we must act.

What we have
to do is find our way into this kind of perception. You see,
my dear friends, the true world, the world of the spirit, has
always been said, and rightly said, to lie on yonder side of
a threshold. The human being lives on this side of a
threshold. He has to pass over this threshold in order to
attain true knowledge, true insight into the constitution of
the world. Speaking generally, it is dangerous for the human
being to cross this threshold without preparation. For if he
carries with him into the spiritual world on yonder side of
the threshold his ordinary sense-perception, permeated with
thoughts as in ordinary life, he calls forth illusion,
downright illusion before his spiritual eyes, because he then
judges things on yonder side of the threshold just as he does
here, in the physical world. Therefore there stands at the
threshold that spiritual being from whom we learn that quite
different concepts are necessary when we cross the threshold,
that illusions paralyze our life if we pass over into the
spiritual world with the ordinary concepts derived from the
world of the senses. This Guardian of the Threshold warns us
that we must first acquire the ideas that are needed in the
spiritual world. People as a rule do not believe that the
concepts which correspond to facts in the spiritual world are
so very different from those which are suitable in the
physical world. In the physical world, for example, the part
is always smaller than the whole. This is an axiom. But it is
not so in the spiritual world. There, the part is always
greater than the whole.

We understand
this from an example drawn from the being of man. If we think
of a force which the human being has within him when, for
instance, he is building up his body out of mineral matter
and then think of the nexus of forces which one part of him
contains, then, in the face of the cosmos, that which forms
the organ — which is the part — is essentially
greater than the whole human being. It is not easy at once to
visualize the maxim that the part is greater than the whole
because you are accustomed to the sense-world; but in face of
the super-sensible world it is absolutely true. We must attain
to the insight that in the spiritual world the part can be
greater than the whole. Our laws of mechanics and physics do
not hold for the super-sensible world, rather precisely the
opposite. Here, in the material world, a straight line is the
shortest distance between two points. In the spiritual world,
it is the longest, because there, if we go in the straight
direction, we have the most obstacles to overcome. Every
other direction is shorter, there, than the straight one.

We must be
absolutely clear that if we want to enter the spiritual
world, ideas and concepts are needed that are quite contrary
to what is a matter of course in the physical world. Courage
is required so that we shall not enter into the spiritual
world in confusion. We must have courage enough to pass over
the spiritual threshold, over the abyss. If we cross over to
the spiritual world, if we pass the Guardian of the Threshold
and reach the spiritual world yonder in the soul and spirit,
in astral body and ego, consciously, then all is well. But if
we do not pass through this experience in the ego and astral
body, illusion arises and when this illusion shoots back upon
the human being, illness is the result. Whenever a man is
ill, he really has the Guardian of the Threshold within him,
but in a kind of demonic counterpart.

There again I
come to the demonic element of which I already had to speak.
When we look at a human being with ordinary perception, all
his members are intermixed. On the one side there is the ego
and the astral body of the man; on the other side there is
the etheric body and the physical body. All seems to be
intermixed when we look at him with ordinary sight. And what
is essential above all is to learn to distinguish what is of
the soul in a human being from what is of the body. When the
soul is in the body, and you are looking at a human being,
the soul does not appear as it really is. Indeed and in truth
the soul is light. You must learn more and more to realize
that the human soul, when we behold it in its absence from
the body, is light. It belongs to what surrounds us as the
etheric elements — it belongs to the light. The human
soul belongs entirely to the realm of light. We see it
rightly when we see it within light.

On the other
hand, the body belongs to heaviness. I have shown how
heaviness is overcome, how the brain becomes much lighter
than its external weight. But the physical body, in the form
in which we perceive it, belongs to heaviness. Just as
through chemical analysis you get hydrogen and oxygen out of
water, so, if you want to behold man in his true being, you
must member him into the soul with its power of radiance and
the body with its might of heaviness. These two realities
— the soul with its power of radiance, and the body
with its might of heaviness — are interwoven in
confusion when they are looked at with physical eyes. And
because they are thus interwoven in confusion, we cannot see
in the body, or in the human being as a whole, the essential
nature of the illness. By so adjusting your soul that you can
observe the human being in such a way that you see how the
nature of the illness is revealed, then, gradually, when you
look at lead, or silver, you will realize what healing forces
are contained in these substances.

But you must
take your medical life in tremendous earnestness. You must
take the meditative life with such strength into your soul
that through this meditative life you grasp the world
differently. And that is why I want to give you now words
which, if they are added to the others (see Lecture Four) and
truly meditated upon, will bring you into the same relation
with particular substances which these substances themselves
have to the healthy and the sick human being. You must let
the words, which I am now going to write on the board, awaken
your souls to the realization that what you see of the human
being in ordinary life is not the reality. When you vitalize
your souls with what lies in these words, then you will
perceive the truth, the true reality of the human being.

What I have
said up to now will help you, in a general way, to understand
the human being in his relation to the cosmos. Today I should
like to give you something that will help you to meditative
knowledge of, say, a tiny piece of gold. I hammer it into a
thin leaf and when I look through it I see green. In its
green appearance it awakens, not from mere vague analogy, the
same inner experience as green meadows, the green plant
covering of the earth; it does indeed awaken this experience
if I look at the gold leaf with deeper forces of soul. If
then I really steep myself, with all my forces of soul, in
the tiny, shimmering piece of gold, the opposite power of
soul is awakened. Then, as well as the green shimmering gold
— as I look now towards it and now away from it —
a whole world comes to me, a whole world shimmers towards me
in a kind of pale bluish-red light. And in that moment I know
that the whole world is present in that tiny piece of gold.
This little piece of gold which, to begin with, has a green
shimmer, is, in reality, a whole sphere. Every tiny piece of
gold is a center of a whole sphere and I learn to live and
weave in the bluish-red, the bluish-violet colors of a
sphere. And then, if you learn to know other qualities of
gold you will realize their living connection. For instance,
you will experience, but fundamentally and basically, the
known quality of gold, namely, that it will not combine with
oxygen. Then, you will say to yourselves: The human being
lives through having oxygen; he lives through perpetually
working in oxygen. In the etheric body, as you know,
everything is different. The etheric body is related to what
is not anchored in the physical body. Gold is related to the
etheric body because it refuses to be combined with oxygen.
So that by virtue of this very quality, gold works as a
healing power in the etheric body for what oxygen, for
example, may give rise to in the physical body. For this
reason, gold is, as it were, a remedy that works from the
center of the human being.

Through this
impression of radiance in the pale bluish-red light, you get
at the inner truth of the saying: “Gold is sun; gold is
wholly sun.” This one piece of gold reveals to you that
in cosmic space, gold is the sun, and that this gold-sun is
related to your etheric body.

But this
means that you are led to those qualities of a substance that
are needed in therapy. But you will only really come to this
realization by taking the following meditation, not as mere
words, but in all earnestness, and as an unceasing challenge
to the soul:

See in thy Soul
Power of Radiance;
Feel in thy Body
Might of Heaviness!

But this must
be a real exercise. You must practice with the aim of making
your soul into something that really streams out into space
and is like light, the power of radiance; and you must
practice with the aim of making your body into something that
through its own inner heaviness is connected with the inner
being of the earth. You must have a real inner experience of
this tremendous contrast, and then you separate your soul and
body, as they should be separated. The verse continues:

In Power of Radiance
Rays the Spirit-I.

In der Leuchtekraft
Strahlet Geistes-Ich.

The human
“P” rises up as an inner experience in the soul.
It is a picture that you must understand. In the soul that is
streaming out, radiating out into the universe, the
“I” unfolds. To these words you must add:

In Might of Heaviness
God-Spirit wells.

In der Schweremacht
Kraftet Gottes-Geist.

The men of
earlier times spoke, not merely in trivial analogy, but as
something in profound correspondence with truth, of the human
being, the human body, as being a temple of the Godhead. Just
as it is true that the “I” is the ruler within
the soul when the soul is conscious, so it is also true that
the Divine, the Godhead, is the ruler in the body. You may
not really speak of your body as your own, for the body is
not of man, but of God. It is so indeed. The body of man
grows out of the Divine forces. To man belongs only the soul
that is within that body. In the instrument that is your body
you must see the temple of God. It is of tremendous
importance to know this:

In Power of Radiance [of the soul]
Rays the Spirit-I;
In Might of Heaviness
God-Spirit wells.

The Divine
Spirit is mighty in the human body, just as the
“I” is mighty in the human soul. And now comes
the important thing:

Yet shall not
Power of Radiance
Lay hold of
Might of Heaviness.

Doch darf nicht
Leuchtekraft
Ergreifen
Schweremacht.

When the
human being is asleep it is dear to you that his soul is
separated from his body. He has separated soul and body.
During sleep the soul has not got hold of the body. But in
waking life, too, the condition must be such that although
the ego and astral body come down in the physical and etheric
bodies, there must be an inner separation, and inner
apartness between the power of radiance and the might of
heaviness. Chemical combination between the power of radiance
and the might of heaviness must not arise; these two powers
must be inwardly separate. They must not mingle with each
other mechanically nor be inwardly united in any way. The
might of heaviness of the body, the power of radiance of the
soul must work side by side, the former downwards, the latter
upwards, within the same space. For that reason, the
following words are important.

Yet shall not
Power of Radiance
Lay hold of
Might of Heaviness,
Nor may
Might of Heaviness
Permeate
Power of Radiance.

The last two
lines merely express the opposite of the first two. That
which our external, sense-knowledge continually mixes
together, must, in reality, be separate within the human
being. When you look at the human being with knowledge that
comes from the senses, everything is intermixed; and if the
human being were indeed what he appears to be to ordinary
perception, he would be ill all the time. The human being can
be healthy, but our material perception of him is a condition
of illness. As we see him, the human being is perpetually
ill, but such perception is, of course, Maya, illusion. In
his true being, a man must never be as we see him. In his
true being of man, power of radiance and might of heaviness
must not be intermingled. They must be inwardly separate from
each other. There must be nothing of what happens in water,
where hydrogen and oxygen enter into a chemical combination
with each other and, in themselves, really disappear. This is
what ordinary sense-perception does; it has had the bad taste
to adopt chemical ideas and to look at the human being as if
he were a combination of the power of radiance and the might
of heaviness. These two are separate and must so remain
— lust as if in water, hydrogen and oxygen were
separate, although united.

For when Power of Radiance seizes
Might of heaviness,
And when Might of Heaviness enters
Power of radiance,
Then in World-confusion Soul and Body
Bind each other
Unto Perdition.

In perdition
is illness. You must take this in full seriousness, so
seriously that it forms your body that you can really look at
the human being according to the power of radiance and might
of heaviness and that you have the feeling when they take
hold of one another, they are enemies. In illness they do lay
hold of one another. When the power of radiance lays hold of
the might of heaviness (weight), bodily illnesses arise; when
the might of heaviness presses into the power of radiance,
the so-called mental illnesses arise. Just think of it
— in the body lives the Divine Spirit. If the power of
radiance seizes upon the might of heaviness, the human being
is wrongly appropriating the Divine within him.

If you learn
to think about these things with the moral impulses that are
necessary, to feel them deeply and then to will with what you
have felt, you gradually begin to perceive the things and
processes of the world in such a way that when the power of
radiance has laid hold of the might of heaviness you realize
how you can separate the power of radiance from the might of
heaviness through something that gives support to the etheric
body from out of the astral body, through some substances or
else through some process in the human being. If you really
feel these things, you will also understand the healing
forces of curative eurythmy. The healing power in curative
eurythmy is something that reckons very specially with the
cosmic forces in the process of healing. When you do
exercises with the consonants in curative eurythmy, you are
within the moon forces. When you unfold the powers of the
vowels in curative eurythmy you are within the Saturn forces.
Through these two kinds of forces in curative eurythmy the
human being feels his way directly into the cosmos.

Therapy, of
course, is the essential thing in medicine, but there can be
no therapy without absolutely useful diagnosis. Suppose we
are able to confirm that the formative principle is too
strong in a human being, that this formative power is coming
from salts or carbohydrates which he cannot keep within
bounds; there is too much form in him. If you really observe
the more delicate workings of the organism—and the
symptoms may be only very subtle — you will find that
vowels in curative eurythmy which work against form will have
an extraordinarily favorable effect.

Or suppose a
child shows a slight tendency to stuttering. I am not, of
course, going to make any dilettante statements about
stuttering being due to this or that cause; naturally, all
kinds of things may be wrong and so be the cause of it. But
whatever the trouble may be, in cases of stuttering a
predominating formative force is present, and therefore vowel
exercises in curative eurythmy will be good, carried out in
the sequence that is natural in the being of man, the true
manifestation of the being of man. So that much can be
achieved with children who have a tendency to stuttering by
taking the vowel sequence: A(ah), E(ay), I(ee), 0, U, in
curative eurythmy provided one has the necessary patience and
love.

If you think
about all these things, my dear friends, you will realize the
importance of regarding the esoteric principles which I gave
you a few days ago and have given today, as a kind of
morality in medical study. By morality I mean the feeling of
being bound to a duty, the feeling of being obliged, through
meditation, to bring the soul into the necessary and lasting
attunement for facing the world in the true and right way. If
lectures could be given you for a whole year, a great deal
could be said in detail and this would be of concrete use to
you in practice. But as in these lectures we could only make
a beginning, it has been of very particular importance to
speak of the development of the medical and therapeutic
powers which lie within the human being — to place
these powers within your reach. For if, with these esoteric
hints, you go to your medical studies, you will see that
things become different. Maybe they will become more
difficult. If someone of a rather dull intellect (and
education makes the intellect dull today) takes up medical
studies, a certain inner persistence will carry him through
the first and second years and help to master things if, as
the result of social circumstances, he feels a moral whip
behind him. But he does not become a physician in the real
sense. He becomes a person whom society appoints to play the
part, but he does not become a physician.

If you let
these things work upon you, a more delicate force of soul
will develop in you. And in many respects the physiology,
psychology and pathology on which medical science is based
today will cause you pain. It will really be as though you
were being offered stones instead of bread. But you
yourselves will, nevertheless, be able to get something out
of these stones. What is offered to you will, after all, not
be without purpose. It will not be easy for you to learn.
There must inevitably be difficulties, for the world with its
materialism is still mighty and we must, in some way, find
our place in it. Having found this place, it is for us to
work our way beyond it. Thus we must certainly become
physicians in the way the world demands and then medical
studies must be permeated with what can be given from
here.

Therefore let
me say once again that opportunity will be given for you to
link yourselves with us here in the way I have indicated. You
must have complete confidence in the way in which the medical
section of the Goetheanum will be led by me in association
with Dr. Wegman. It is precisely medicine, as it can be
pursued here, that can show you how human life can really be
experienced — strange as this expression is. Therefore
when you are once again out in the world and one thing or
another occurs to you, write your wishes and your hearts'
desires and an answer will be given to everybody in the
monthly circular letter. And in this way — which is, to
begin with, the only practicable one — external medical
studies will be able to be permeated with what can be given
here.

You see,
there are extraordinarily few people yet — and they can
only be the young ones really — who are able to build
the bridge between the spiritual aims of Dornach and the
materialistic science that holds sway in the outside world.
At the present time it can only be a few, and really only
those who are still at the stage of their studies. Why?

I once had to
give a lecture about a particular chapter of therapy which
was attended by medical students and also a professor, a
professor of medicine. I was able to watch this man. He came
to the lecture thinking that he would find confirmation of
his belief that it would be the usual kind of superficial
twaddle talked of by quacks. I was able to make a real study
of metamorphosis in watching this professor, for on the one
side he was inwardly resisting, but on the other side he was
astonished. He was obliged to come to the conclusion that it
was not rubbish, but naturally he could not say
“Yes” to it, because it completely contradicted
what he had regarded for decades as being true and correct. I
spoke to him after the lecture and it emerged that he was
saying to himself: “I would prefer to keep out of all
that.” He could not have gone as far as this if he had
really thought it nonsense.

If he had
thought it nonsense he would easily have kicked it away in
the usual manner. He thought he could kick it away, too, but
in reality he could not, and the very most that one could
have hoped for from a professor was that he should have said
to himself: “I would prefer to keep out of all
that.” One could not expect more than this. But a young
person must have quite a different attitude. A young person
has no antecedents and he, therefore, is still able to absorb
things which can lead to the healing of humanity. And if this
happens, my dear friends, it will really come to pass that
gradually perhaps more quickly than we thinkGoetheanum
spirituality will enter into medicine.

But what must
happen first is that these things shall be continued with
real earnestness, and that you go on doing as Dr. Wegman has
told me you have done — that you go on coming to her to
make the link in full confidence with the true kind of
medical studies and with those things that must flow as time
goes on, into the materialistic medicine of today. You can do
much for yourselves and also much for the world and for sick
humanity if you do not regard what you have now heard as
something merely transitory, but as a starting-point for that
with which such a good beginning has been made. In this sense
we will remain united, my dear friends, remain so united that
the center to which you adhere here in Dornach, at the
Goetheanum, can work in the world, through you. That is what
I wanted to say to you as a kind of warning. Then things will
go well and much will be added to what we have spoken of
here. It may be an ideal in your life of feeling, but it can
become, in very truth, life. And as such we will maintain it,
my dear friends.

See in thy Soul
Power of Radiance;
Feel in thy Body
Might of Heaviness!
In Power of Radiance
Rays the Spirit-I;
In Might of Heaviness
God-Spirit wells.
Yet shall not
Power of Radiance
Lay hold of
Might of Heaviness,
Nor may
Might of Heaviness
Permeate
Power of Radiance.
For when Power of Radiance seizes
Might of Heaviness,
And when Might of Heaviness enters
Power of Radiance,
Then in World-confusion Soul and Body
Bind each other
Unto Perdition.